All The Best, Jess

Yesterday, I studied the scriptures with my pandemic bubble on the grass by the duck pond. The past few days it has finally started to settle into fall temperature wise, and it was one of the all-around prettiest days I'd seen in a while. While winters are hard to weather, being that I am still very unaccustomed to the cold, I have to agree that fall is absolutely stunning here. Sometimes it's still weird to me that I am so comfortable with these people that I have essentially tackled life with for the last seven months. There are more and more moments lately where I can speak my mind or be myself and I don't replay the conversations over and over and over again, berating myself for living and taking up space. Of course, I am nowhere near perfect, and still have many moments where I relive too much, but I've made a lot of progress and that's really important to me. Two of us are wearing yellow. I just recently decided that I really loved that color, and I still get ...

As people, we have this inherent inclination to make everything beautiful. It's one of my favorite things about us: despite the odds and circumstances, we can find something interesting in whatever we are faced with. As much as I love it, I also know how dangerous and ignorant the need to romanticize everything can be. We create tropes out of trauma and pedestal people who never asked to be.  One of my biggest pet peeves is the question  But doesn't it help you be so creative? that often follows any comment about struggling to live with mental illnesses. I hate the way people talk about Van Gogh, that he ate yellow paint to be happy, I hate the idea that an artist must be tortured. When people bring up Robin Williams, it is always to talk about how the saddest people work the hardest to make others happy, when I talk about my own trauma people feel the need to commend my kindness, and I hate that tragedy and beauty are so closely tied to each other that you cannot speak of one...

It's been a while. I guess, with the pandemic and near daily apocalyptic happenings, I didn't know how to adequately write about anything. Between people not taking the pandemic seriously, renewed conversations about systemic racism and human trafficking, the tragedy that is the election this year, and a million other tiny fires along the way, I didn't know what the right thing to say was. Because I come from a relatively privileged situation, I often wonder if it even is my place to say anything--shouldn't I be using the position I am to amplify the voices of the people who are actively hurting?  However, I've gotten well and tired of sitting and watching and worrying that my contribution in this apparently penultimate era of the world will be sitting and watching and worrying and sharing a few posts by people I feel are more eloquent than I. So, I make an attempt at putting my two cents into this global conversation. Over the past few months, I have seen countless...

Hi, I'm Jess. Or Jessie, or really anything that isn't Jessica. I've been writing on this blog for roughly a year and a half--although the location changed about a year ago. Since everyone who I show this blog to knows me already, at least for the most part, I never really introduced myself on here because I figured it was redundant. However, over the last year and a half, a lot of things have changed. Like. A LOT. That's to be expected, I guess. As a person in their 20s, I think it's normal to feel like "self" is ill-defined and ever-changing. That being said, I do want to give something like an introduction, if only so I have a more overt record of who I am right now. So, this is me. When I was little, I believed deeply in magic. I was pen pals with the toothfairy, I wished on stars and dandelions and eyelashes, and I often looked out my window hoping to catch a glimpse of Peter Pan. I jumped off chairs, trying to fly, and I thought if I tried har...

You know, my last blog post started with a commentary on everything happening at once. I am a firm believer that God has a well-developed sense of humor that is heavily based on dramatic irony, because if I thought a lot was going on a couple of weeks ago, I really had no idea what was happening next. Just the other day, I was having a really hard time and crying to a friend, and I said "I wish I could have a break." It seems I needed to be clearer--I wanted a break from the thoughts inside of my head, not everything that distracts me from them. My college, as many it seems, has decided to go online for the rest of the semester. I understand and agree with the precautions...but I am an arts major. Online classes are tricky in my field, and I am also losing a lot of what makes an arts major so rewarding: so many of my friends have had to stop working and have lost performances of shows they have spent months working on. There was no real closure to any of this--there are peo...

Life has a funny way of happening all at once. To me, at least, it has seemed like I've been hit by a train of responsibilities, or at least things that seem urgent to focus on. In trying to decide where I needed to turn for priorities, I have often turned to prayer. Being human, it's really hard to see the full picture of what is happening in life and where it could lead. I can't see the future, nor do I have a perfect knowledge of where different choices could potentially go.  In searching for guidance, I received clear answers that by focusing on my faith and relationship with my Savior and Heavenly Parents I would be able to see where I should go and what I should do. At times this has caused some stress: I am a full-time student, and sometimes choosing to focus on things that aren't just school-related all the time seems very dangerous. However, I don't take spiritual counsel lightly, so I have made efforts in the last couple of months to really focus on und...

I have always been a person who sought faith. I've been an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints since I was baptized when I was eight years old, and in many ways my faith has shaped who I am and is the reason I am who I am today. I cannot imagine where I would be without it, because I have never lived without it. However, faith, the actual principle in believing in something I cannot see, is not an easy concept to grasp or practice. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with me knows that I thrive off of connection. What brings me the most joy in life are the relationships I form with other people--I strive to make deep or at least personal connections with as many people as possible, because I truly believe that is something we are starved of in this day and age, especially in Western culture. Because of this, I have spent the last six months realizing and working on a personal and true connection with my Savior Jesus Christ and my Heavenly Parents...